Peerceptiv is used for peer review assignments where students can view each other’s work and provide feedback. Students can evaluate the feedback they receive and reflect on their own work.
With this tool, as a teacher, I can:
Organise peer feedback within a Canvas group
Encourage students to provide positive and critical feedback
Enable students to reflect on the feedback they receive
By critically evaluating others’ work, students gain insights that they can apply to their own work, thereby gaining a better understanding of the success criteria.
Students learn to provide constructive feedback and process the feedback they receive.
Students actively engage with the assessment criteria that are used to evaluate their own work.
Peerceptiv offers templates for various types of peer review assignments, where the teacher only needs to set the deadlines and assessment criteria.
Peer feedback can save teachers time, provided that the process of giving and processing feedback is sufficiently guided, especially at the beginning.
What is this tool less suitable for?
The use of Peerceptiv becomes quickly complex when you want to use advanced settings (giving reviews, viewing reviews, evaluating received reviews, performing self-review).
When you only use the basic functions, it is simpler to use. It takes time to learn to work with Peerceptiv initially, both for you and the students. If you want to organise a simple peer feedback assignment, Canvas peer review is more user-friendly.
You can set only one deadline per assignment in Peerceptiv. If different workgroups meet on different days, you can only add one deadline for all these workgroups. However, you can create a separate assignment and corresponding deadline for each workgroup.
When does this tool work best?
When asking students to provide feedback to each other, a safe learning environment is crucial (1).
Discuss this environment with the students: what makes them feel comfortable? Take into account the cultural differences among your students. One idea is to anonymise submissions or feedback providers. Giving constructive feedback is a skill that students need to develop. Therefore, students require explicit instruction on:
How to formulate a comment
What to focus on when giving feedback
What criteria to use for providing feedback
You can have students use the rubric of the assignment to guide their feedback (2). This helps both feedback providers and receivers to gain a better understanding of the assignment’s evaluation criteria.
(1) Winstone, N., & Carless, D. (2019). Designing effective feedback processes in higher education: A learning-focused approach. Routledge. (2) Van Popta, E., Kral, M., Camp, G., Martens, R. L., & Simons, P. R. J. (2017). Exploring the value of peer feedback in online learning for the provider. Educational Research Review, 20, 24-34.
